Published byStanford Medicine

I fell in love with the art of data visualization while working on Stanford Medicine magazine’s new special report on the medical data deluge and how it’s changing research and health care. When I put out word that I was gathering images to possibly illustrate our report, in came this one from Purvesh Khatri, PhD, who works with Atul Butte, MD, PhD, medical data-mining maven.

The figure represents biological networks interacting with each other during kidney transplant rejection. Each circle indicates a cell signaling pathway, with the dots making up the circle representing genes in the pathway and the lines between the dots showing interactions between those genes. Yellow, orange and red lines mark one gene activating the other; green lines mark one repressing the other. The black lines show crosstalk between pathways. Khatri created the image with data from the NCI-Nature Pathway Interaction Database.